Think of all the miners in the past who have been trapped and were not rescued. Imagine knowing even one human being was buried alive and not making the effort — whatever the expense — to get them out.

ADDED:

"This is our casino," the miner says at one point, showing a table where the miners, he says, had made some makeshift dominoes.

These miners are like the middle class Americans trapped in a caved in economy. But instead of a rescue, we have a Marxist earth moving administration using the EPA and bailouts of the elite to forever seal us into our trapped condition. We need a rescue.

"Imagine knowing even one human being was buried alive and not making the effort — whatever the expense — to get them out."

Imagine. You can almost hear John Lennon singing away, and visualize the CPark memento to him. But reality is weirder than anything you might imagine. An old observation - the idea that the "death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic" -- captures it well. Emotion and moral feelings pull in one direction; utilitarian rationality (the 'do you know how many more lives we could save if we redirected the recourses to X' idea) in another. It's encouraging that, in instances like this, emotion and moral feelings carry the day.

It's sn antidote, I suppose, to the posts about Avastin and ObamaCare of a few days ago.

Then on Wednesday, the health minister announced that officials had informed the miners that they would not be rescued before Chile’s Independence Day on Sept. 18 and that “we hoped to get them out before Christmas.”

so that actually haven't been told on purpose that it will take 3 months.

What they have been told is, it may be 3 weeks more, but could stretch 3 months.

One possible saving grace: Experience has shown that people isolated for an extended amount of time, cut off from daylight and other visual references, tend to lose track of the time. I recall a young woman buried in the collapse of a South Korean department store; she was rescued after 17 days, and apparently thought that she had spent only a fraction of that time in the rubble.